1

Introduction: Postcoloniality and

the Perspective of History

The essays below are contributions to the ongoing effort in contemporary cul-
tural criticism to comprehend the reconfiguration of global relations under con-
ditions of what might be described synoptically as global postmodernity. The
essays examine from a diversity of perspectives problems in the new ideological
formations, or the critiques of ideology, that have accompanied the economic,
social, political and cultural remapping of the world, especially that part of the
world that was encompassed earlier by the term Third World, An underlying
premise of the essays, of which they may be viewed as demonstrations in a vari-
ety of locations, is the existence of a structural resonance between postmodernity
as a historical condition generated by transformations in capitalism, and post-
modernism as a way of speaking about that condition. Some of the essays trace
this connection through an examination of ideological transformations in the
Asia-Pacific region, which happens to be my area specialty, but is also important
in its own right as a generator of postmodernity because of the crucial role it has
come to play in the globalization of capitalism. The majority of the essays engage
from this same perspective of a global capitalism the theoretical and ideological
questions raised by contemporary reconceptualizations of global relations that
are informed by a variety of postmodern perspectives; but especially the one off-
shoot of postmodernism that goes by the designation of postcolonialism.
In the preface to his collection of essays on postmodernism, Fredric Jameson
writes that, "I would not want to have to decide whether the following chapters
are inquiries into the nature o f . . . 'postmodernist theory,' or mere examples of
it."1 In the indecision is an acknowledgment that in the process of subjecting
postmodernism to critical scrutiny, his own Marxist theoretical stance has been
infiltrated, disturbed and reconfigured by postmodernism, blurring the distinc-
tion between a Marxist discourse on postmodernism and an appropriation of
Marxism into the discourse of postmodernity.
A consistent Marxist materialism may be an important contributing factor in
the blurring of boundaries between the two discourses, Jameson's seminal con-

/
2 Introduction

tribution to the discussion of postmodernism was his grounding of postmod-

ernism in the transformations of everyday life under Late Capitalism, as "the
cultural logic" of the latter. The same procedure, however, confronts Marxism
not just with the discourse of postmodernity, but with the material circum-
stances to which that discourse speaks, presenting theory with the necessity of
accounting for historical circumstances, the novelty of which defies efforts to
contain them within its received categories. If it is to be something other than a
nostalgic escape into the past or a Utopian avoidance of the present, the Marxist
critique of postmodernism must also account for the radical transformations
reshaping the world, and ways of speaking about it. A thoroughgoing material-
ism requires that the theory which informs the critique of postmodernism must
itself undergo self-criticism and reconfiguration in the very process of its criti-
cal operations, assuming at least some features of postmodernism—provided
that there is indeed some structural connection between postmodernism and its
historical circumstances.
There is a similar confounding in the essays below of boundaries between post-
modernism and Marxism in their enunciations or applications within Third
World contexts. Marxism appears in the discussions as an indispensable theoret-
ical resource for understanding the forces structuring "the condition of post-
modernity," which is not to be divorced from the structural changes brought
about by Global Capitalism. On the other hand, the very affirmation of post-
modernism as an equally indispensable way of speaking about that condition
calls into question the spatial and temporal premises of Marxism as a theory of
modernity. It is important to sustain these seemingly contradictory stances, I
think, in order to speak about the world in new ways, while avoiding ideological
entrapment in its aura of novelty.
It is for this same reason that I retain the designation "Third World" in the title
of the volume, as well as in some of the essays below, I argue in one essay below
that the Third World may never have had any significance other than as a discur-
sive category, and may be quite meaningless presently with the transformation of
the conditions to which an earlier discourse referred ("Three Worlds or One, or
Many? The Reconfiguration of Global Relations under Contemporary Capital-
ism"). It is important nevertheless to recall the idea of a Third World against the
currently fashionable notion of the postcolonial, which is equally discursive, not
because the idea of Three Worlds has any descriptive relevance presently but
because there were political meanings embedded in the ideal of a Third World
that may still be relevant, and that carry with them a perspective of the past on
the present, with the critical possibilities that such a perspective affords. In an ide-
ological situation where the future has been all but totally colonized by the ideol-
ogy of capital, we can ill afford to overlook the critical perspectives afforded by
past alternatives that have been suppressed by the history of capital. I take the
recovery of these alternatives in memory to be not regressive, but rather as a
Introduction 3

means to keeping alive alternative visions of society that may yet open up the
future in new ways.
This is a theme that appears in all the essays below, gaining in emphasis in the
progressioa of the essays (which are presented here in the order in which they
were originally written) which in their unfolding should provide some indication
of my own gropings toward possible answers to questions raised by my critique
of existing critical positions, I take history to be crucial to a critical hermeneutic
that seeks to sustain contradictions between the present and the past, so as to
keep open the possibilities they may offer by way of living in the world, without
resorting to ideological or metaphysical resolutions that nourish oft a distant and
uncertain future. As contributions to cultural criticism, the discussions below
share a common ground in a concern to affirm the centrality of history against a
tendency to its marginalization in much of contemporary cultural criticism. It is
not that cultural critics do not speak about history; indeed, they speak about it a
great deal, but in ways that, for methodological reasons, preempt the possibility
of serious confrontation between the present, the past and the future; the post-
modernist "naturalization of the language paradigm," John O'Neill writes, "is the
ideological counterpart to the dehistoricization and the depolitici/ation of the
capitalist process."' Given my own disciplinary location, the effort to foreground
history may be construed as an attempt to recover a disciplinary domain from the
intrusions of cultural critics who happen to be for the most part literary histori-
ans and critics. It is not. I hope it is sufficiently clear from the discussions below
that my critique of cultural criticism where it falls short of a sufficient recogni-
tion of questions of history and historicity is accompanied by a recognition of
value to new ways of reading history that it has brought to the fore, to which,
unfortunately, historians have been conspicuously oblivious. My concern is not
with disciplinary delineations of history, but rather with history as epistemology,
the marginalization of which deprives us of a crucial dimension to be accounted
for in any serious consideration of human liberation.
It is history and historicity as they have been reworked under the sign of the
postmodern that guides the analyses below. One of the fundamental contribu-
tions of postmodernism—indeed a defining feature of postmodernity—is the
questioning of the teleology of the modern, and of other teleologies imbedded in
economic, political and cultural narratives that have constituted the idea of the
modern; so that it becomes possible once again to conceive the past not merely as
a route to the present, but as a, source of alternative historical trajectories that had
to be suppressed so that the present could become a possibility. While this ques-
tioning has opened up new possibilities in understanding the past, and has been
equally important in opening up the past as a reservoir of multiple political pos-
sibilities, it has not eliminated therefore the forces that constituted modernity
historically which persist as a burden of the past over the present. While it has
undermined the claims of modernity on historical consciousness, it has been less
4 Introduction

successful in accounting for the contradictory consequences of repudiating the

modern, and even for the ways in which the modern continues to inform the
postmodern. Above all, the multiplicity of historical trajectories that have resur-
faced in historical consciousness with the dethroning of the modern, and as both
generators and beneficiaries of the postmodern, present contradictions that point
to novel political possibilities as well as new political dangers, At the precise
moment when a "pathos of novelty" (in Hannah Arendt's words) makes the past
seem irrelevant to the present, the proliferation of such contradictions calls for an
accounting of those forces shaping the present which is no more immune than
earlier ages to the burden of history. The recognition that what we call history
may be no more than an aggregate of interactive and contradictory histories, in
the multiplicity of choices it presents, may indeed have increased the burden of
history by eliminating the familiar landmarks provided by earlier teleologies. No
longer merely a route to the present that may be relegated to the past as soon as
it has been traversed, history confronts us as a source of conflicting choices, with
all the intellectual and political responsibilities implied by the ability to choose
without the benefit of ideological legitimation. To make matters worse, the evi-
dence of daily life and politics provides constant reminder that, however we may
pretend otherwise, the same history limits choice by providing the conditions
under which we may make those choices.
Before I proceed to elaborate on the different ways in which I deploy history in
the essays to confront some of these problems and contradictions, it is necessary
to emphasize that with one exception that addresses the question of the relation-
ship between postmodernism and contemporary corporate power, the essays
below are not concerned with general problems of postmodernism. Neither am I
concerned with postmodernism in literature or the arts, where it may have the
most concrete and precise meaning. The postmodernism that is of primary inter-
est here is that which represents a new mapping of problems of economic, social,
political and cultural development; the immediate referents are modernity and
modernization, rather than modernism. This is the sense also in which 1 view the
term "postcolonialism," which is the version of postmodernism that is of the
greatest relevance in the essays below,
What I suggested above of cultural criticism may be said with equal validity of
postcolonial criticism: that the same epistemological premises that account for its
insights into history may be responsible also for fundamental problems in its rep-
resentation of the past and its relationship to the present. It is necessary, before
going on to discuss the problem of history in relationship to postcolonial criti-
cism, to spell out what I understand by the epistemological claims of postcolo-
nialism. Given the diffuseness and residual quality of much of the postcolonial
argument, these claims may not apply equally to all those who would describe
themselves as postcolonial critics; conversely, others may share in some of these
premises without necessarily describing themselves as postcolonial critics. Suffice
it to say that the summarization of the postcolonial position here is based pri-
Introduction 5

tnarily on the orientations of those postcolonial critics who have been most anx-
ious to liberate cultural criticism from its subjection to historical narratives that
presuppose structural contexts of one kind or another; and whose works eschew
any significant incorporation of such larger narratives into the explanatory
schemes that they employ. It is my impression that this version of postcolonial
criticism has exerted enormous influence in redirecting cultural criticism away
from earlier orientations, associated mostly with Marxism but also with femi-
nism, although some feminists seem to have been able to appropriate it for their
own problems. I will return in the conclusion to other postcotonia! orientations
which do not deny structural contexts but rather see in postcolonialist episte-
mology a corrective to an earlier preoccupation with structures, that is much
closer to the position that informs these discussions.-1

The Epistemology of Postcolonial Criticism

The affirmation of "difference" is basic to a postcolonial epistemology. Differ-
ence is important not just as a description of a situation, but more importantly
because it shapes language, and therefore, the meaning of identity; every repre-
sentation of the self carries upon it the trace of the "other." Identity, it follows, is
never "essential," but the product of relationships. Whether informed by
Bakhtin's dialogics or Derrida's "difference," difference and the negotiation of
difference becomes crucial to the construction of identity and, by extension, of
culture. The difference here, of course, is not a difference that divides but one
that unites the self and the other in a mutual dependency.
Three aspects of this episternological premise are worth emphasizing. First is
that the production of meaning in linguistic encounters becomes a metaphor for
all encounters, rendering the economy of discourse into a paradigm for all
encounters, including the encounters of political economy. A subsidiary conse-
quence of this metaphorization of social encounters seems to be a conviction
that literary works suffice as evidence of what goes on in the world. Method-
ologically, one of the interesting byproducts of postcolonial criticism seems to
be that there is little significant difference between the world and its representa-
tions in fiction. While I would not care to argue, as a professional historian, that
historians do better than the producers of fiction in representations of the past,
it is necessary still to raise the distinction as an episternological problem. Con-it is necessary still to raise the distinction as an episternological problem. Con-
trary to the promise of a "new historicism," that wished to historicize literature,
historical thinking over the last decade has been converted into a subfield of lit-
erature, with emphasis shifting from questions of evidence to questions of nar-
rativization and representation, with consequences that undermine epistemolo-
gies in both literature and history.* The linguistic turn, if I may put it that way,
has obviated the need to confront contrary evidence of great significance that
may seem marginal from a perspective that is focused, parochially, on questions
of narrative representation.
6 Introduction

Secondly, and in a somewhat contrary direction, postcolonial criticism con-

ceptualizes such encounters in the language of the marketplace, with meanings
being negotiated as if the negotiators held equal power in the negotiations, each
side seeking maximum advantage. I will have something to say on the political
implications of these premises below. A third aspect, more immediately relevant
here, is the stress on the porosity of boundaries, which may account for the pro-
liferation of the terminology of "border crossings" in the literature of cultural
criticism over the last decade. Boundaries that divide by essentialized notions of
self and the other must be rejected in favor of "border crossings" which underline
mutual dependency in the conceptualization of identity, which "enshrines syn-
cretism and hybridity."5 Hybridity and in-betweenness are signature words of
postcolonial criticism, along with heterogeneity, difference and multiplicity.
One of the fundamental consequences of these premises is that the most sig-
nificant politics is the politics of identity, how identity is constructed at the level
of local encounters and according to local circumstances. Since the individual is
not a mere expression of "essentialized" group identity, but an active participant
in the formation of group identity in numerous localized encounters with others,
these encounters, rather than structures that may confine the "heterogeneity" of
the individual must provide the point of departure for analysis—as well as mean-
ingful politics. Indeed, insistence on structures, or master narratives of any kind
(from capitalism to imperialism, from nationalism to revolution to ethnicity,
class, and gender) implies an essentialism that subordinates the local to imagined
and invented categories that reproduce the categories that hegemonic structures
of power have imposed upon the world. The persistence of hegemony is evident
in the suppression not just of the local politics of identity, but in the negation of
the subjectivity of the oppressed who have at their disposal means of resistance to
oppression that are not necessarily expressed at the level of politics, but in cul-
tural appropriations that subvert hegemony. Political radicals, who insist on the
necessity of politics, including revolutionary politics, by implication, are part of
a structure of hegemony, because they perpetuate assumptions of structural
oppression that replicate assumptions of the dominant culture. Somewhere in the
course of the argument, it is necessary to point out, the debate over oppositional
politics becomes a debate over oppositional cultures, as if there is no need to dis-
tinguish the one from, the other. What the abolition of this difference between
culture and politics means politically is revealing, as I will comment on later, of
the politics of postcoloniality.
The politics of identity, finally, has found favor with feminism, which has
enhanced significantly the popularity of postcolonial criticism. Third World
women and women of color in general have found in postcolonial criticism an
epistemology with which to counter universalized (and hegemonic) notions of
gender. This same epistemology could also be applied to class relations, although
that is considerably less common.11 Postcolonial epistemology no doubt has con-
tributed significantly to fine-tuning these concepts, and in turn has benefited
Introduction 7

from the complexities they have introduced on matters of identity. On the other
hand, it is important to note that such extensions of postcolonial epistemology
have resulted in something of a confusion that disguises its historical specificity.
The ritual invocations of the holy trinity of race-class-gender in these discussions
mystify the increasingly privileged place assumed by ethnicity and race in such
analyses, due in part to a postcolonialist epistemology, the point of departure for
which is not a generalized theory of identity formation in terms of social rela-
tionships (which is hardly original), but a very specific form of social relation-
ships grounded in ethnic or racial relationships. It is an irony of postcolonial epis-
temology that, intended to combat ethnic, national and racial essentialisms, it
should nevertheless foreground relationships informed by such essentialisms in
cultural criticism at the cost of overshadowing those other relationships so that a
preoccupation with ethnicity (however it is defined) becomes a sign of the post-
modern; against the modernizationist assumption that it could be dissolved into
class and even, gender relations.

Postcolonial Criticism in the Perspective of History

The question of history appears in several guises in the discussions below which
I would like to highlight here. I am concerned throughout with the relationship
of history to a contemporary radical agenda; both in the critique of residual and
emergent configurations of power, and in the consideration of radical political
possibilities appropriate to the times.
As postcolonial criticism has emerged as the heir to earlier radical conceptual-
izations of global relations, examination of the historical circumstances of its
emergence is crucial to an evaluation, of its radical claims. The importance of the
perspective of history in the spatial and temporal mapping of postcolonial criti-
cism as a radical intellectual movement is the explicit subject of two of the essays
below ("The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Cap-
italism," and "Postcolonial or Postrevolutionary? The Problem of History in Post-
colonial Criticism"). A more thorough historicization would require an internal
mapping of postcolonial criticism, for subscription to an epistemology of post-
colonialism does not necessarily imply an identical attitude toward other episte-
moiogies (for example, Marxism), or, therefore, an identical political stance
toward contemporary questions of power, which leads Paul Gilroy to speak of
"the ethno-historical specificity of the discourse of cultural studies."71 will return
to the importance of such a distinction in the concluding section of this intro-
duction. Suffice it to say here that I am interested here not in an intellectual his-
tory of postcoloniaiism, which might be premature, but in the historical place of
postcolonial ism against earlier radical formulations of global relations.
It is difficult to say where postcoloniaiism belongs on a global map, since its
proponents claim it to be applicable to all societies that have experienced colo-
nialism, that range from the formerly colonial societies of Africa to the United
8 Introduction

States (as a British colony in origin). The spatial uncertainty is itself an indication
of the unsettling of boundaries. It is probably fair to say that the term presents
itself as a substitute for what was called the Third World after World War II, and
colonial/semi-colonial societies for the half century before that, Aijaz Ahmad has
pointed out that in the early seventies, when the term "postcolonial" first
appeared, it had concrete referents in societies that had liberated themselves
recently from colonialism," The scope of the term has been expanded consider-
ably since then, but its claims need to be evaluated against that legacy. The post-
colonial may be heir to an earlier terminology, but the radical way in which it
breaks with the conceptualizations embedded in that terminology is evident in its
extension to cover not only societies of the First World, but also in its claims to
universal applicability globally.
The when and the where in the emergence of postcolonialism are somewhat
easier to locate. The term in its current usage acquired popularity in the late
1980s, and rapidly catapulted to the forefront of cultural studies, making an
impact not only across academic disciplines, but, through slogans such as "mul-
ticulturalism," in politics as well, especially the politics of academic institutions.
The dynamic power moving the discourse of postcoloniality was the visible
impact on cultural studies of intellectuals of Third World origin in First World
institutions. The original location for it, in other words, was the First World, but
a First World whose earlier distance from the Third World was abridged by the
motions of intellectuals. Since then, it has also spread globally, even to unlikely
locations such as postsocialist China,
The changes that made the motions of Third World intellectuals possible, and
enabled them to acquire a hearing in First World institutions, point to the histor-
ical circumstances of the emergence of postcolonialism as a radical intellectual
and political contender in contemporary thought and ideology. The emergence of
postcolonialism to the forefront of consciousness has coincided over the last
decade with the increasing visibility of the term "diaspora," which may well be the
immediate social condition for a postcolonial consciousness. Diasporas have
become a highly visible component of a global social landscape, Diasporic popu-
lations, however, contain a complex range of social groupss from political refugees
to those driven to emigration out of economic necessity to highly educated and
wealthy professionals who are cosmopolitan by education, outlook and their abil-
ity to function across cultural spaces. The participation of this last group in
transnational motions of people has empowered diasporic populations in
unprecedented ways. Transnational diasporic populations have scrambled
national allegiances, and intensified ethnic and cultural encounters that cut across
national boundaries, challenging earlier spatialities organized around nations
with new spatiatities in which such encounters play a formative part. They have
called into question assumptions of homogeneous national cultures in both host
societies (usually, but not necessarily, Eurocentric) and in societies of origin
which deny authenticity to cultures of emigrants. Postcolonialism from this per-
spective appears as the ideology of articulate groups within diasporic populations
Introduction 9

who challenge earlier configurations of ethnicity and culture with a new con-
sciousness that springs from their own conditions of existence. In the words of
Edward Said, "liberation as an intellectual mission, born in the resistance and
opposition to the confinements and ravages of imperialism, has now shifted from
the settled, established and domesticated dynamics of culture to its unhoused,
decentered, and exilic energies, whose incarnation today is the migrant, and
whose consciouness is that of the intellectual and artist in exile, the political fig-
ure between domains, between forms, between homes, and between languages."*
Said's statement is reminiscent of what Georg Simmel wrote a century earlier
of the "objectivity" of "the stranger"; that it "does not simply involve passivity and
detachment; it is a particular structure composed of distance and nearness, indif-
ference and involvement,"10 The important historical question is why, when the
knowledge of the stranger, and the very features of his/her existence, were objects
of suspicion and alienation in an earlier day, such knowledge can move to the
forefront of consciousness in the contemporary world, especially the contempo-
rary First World? Those signature words of postcolonial criticism, hybridity and
in-betweenness, appear in postcolonial discourse as features of the modal per-
sonality, in contrast to the undesirable connotations they carried in an earlier day
when, in the case of Asian-Americans, for example, they served as excuses for
their exclusion from the United States, What is it that has changed?
Postcolonial criticism is suspicious of explanations based on structure on the
grounds that such explanations erase local differences and encounters. This is
possible when homogenizing structures are substituted for local differences, but
it is not a necessity of structural explanations that are based on relationships,
including the relationships between localized and global structures, I insist in the
essays below that the new diasporic social formations, and the consciousness they
generate, are not to be explained without reference to structural transformations
in the global economy, which have empowered Third World societies in new
ways. Thanks to these transformations, societies that earlier were marginal to a
EuroAmerican capitalism, or were objects of exploitation to the latter, have
emerged as key players in the global economy. Likewise, labor, including high-
level intellectual labor, from these societies has become crucial to the operations
of First World transnational corporations not merely in their operations abroad,
but even at home—as with the high-level technological labor force that the U.S.
computer and communications industries have come to depend upon. Hybridity
and in-betweenness, once liabilities, have become assets that facilitate the
transnational operations of global corporations. In the process, a Eurocentric
conception of modernity has given way to a multicultural one, enabling the
reassertion of Third World cultural formations that were suppressed earlier by
Eurocentric ideologies.
While Eurocentrism is once again subject to challenge from alternative cultural
positions, however, the reassertion of these cultural positions requires their artic-
ulation to the ideology of a globalized capitalism, which provides the totality
within which local cultural encounters take place, and condition them without
10 Introduction

necessarily leading to homegenous consequences. In this sense, an excessive pre-

occupation with Eurocentrism distracts attention from the more dynamic rela-
tionship between local cultures and the cultural forces of a Global Capitalism.
Also, while heterogeneity, hybridity, etc. at the local level may open up cultural
boundaries to enable different groups to negotiate their differences, which is
quite radical on the surface," it is difficult to see where such opening up leads
unless it also addresses the structural conditions set by the larger totality which
conditions all the groups in question, whether they are based on class, gender,
racial, religious or ethnic allegiances. In this perspective, while the postcolonialist
argument addresses important questions at one level, it also distracts from the
problems presented by a Global Capitalism, and even reinforces the ideology of
the latter; the effort to accommodate in theory situations created by the dynam-
ics of a contemporary capitalism in effect makes critique indistinguishable from
the legitimation of these situations—unless critique incorporates questions of
structure that go beyond the local. (In addition to the two essays on post colonial
criticism cited above, these problems are addressed at length in "The Global in
the Local" and "The Postmodernization of Production and Its Organization:
Flexible Production, Work and Culture," especially the latter.) My historicization
of posScolonial criticism, it may be underlined here, is in terms of history con-
ceived of structurally; the postcolonialist argument is in some ways much closer
to a conventional historicism in its liberal, and even libertarian, versions.
A second way in which I deploy history below is in the critique of the histori-
cal claims of the postcolonial argument which, contrary to its own professions, is
totalizing itself in extending the postcolonial epistemology globally, and project-
ing it back upon the past, without regard to structural differences between its own
historical location and other histories, past and present. Postcolonialism's empha-
sis on "difference" as an epistemological and methodological point of departure
is enabling at the level of local differences. Without an account of structural con-
ditions which are rejected as obstacles to grasping difference in its localized vari-
ation, a radical insistence on difference results in the erasure of the significant dif-
ferences in the meaning of difference at different locations, and an inability to
recognize that not all differences are equally different. Hans Bertens has noted
that postcolonialism, and postmodernism in general, in their insistence on dif-
ference, seem to be incapable ironically of recognizing and accounting for "real"
differences."
The irony may be an irony of the times. The same global circumstances that
generate postcoloniality would seem also to be marginalizing entire populations
around the world, while also provoking among newly empowered Third World
societies the reassertion of ethnicity, cultural nationalism and racism, with their
claims to difference at levels quite at odds with the localized politics of identity
that is the staple of postcolonial criticism; so much so that we seem to be living,
and dealing with, two separate worlds, the world of cultural criticism and the
world of newly reconfigured geopolitical essential isms. While these two worlds
may confront one another as mutually hostile ideological spaces, it is possible that
Introduction 11

they are both products of the same processes. In his Postmodernism and Islam,
Akbar Ahmed writes that "ethno-religious revivalism is both cause and effect of
postmodernism,"" It is a cause because the resurfacing of native cultural forma-
tions following nearly a century of suppression under modernizing regimes chal-
lenges the Eurocentric assumptions that have hitherto guided development poli-
cies; effect because the decline of Eurocentrism with the reconfiguration of global
power relations allows them to resurface, Postcolonial discourse and these
reassertions of essentialized identities both foreground ethnicity, but with vastly
different social, cultural and political implications (which is the "real" difference
to which Bertens refers). Rather than confront this problem which is a challenge
to any radical criticism of the world, postcolonial criticism cavalierly dismisses
what it calls "essentialisms," and insists on flattening out global differences in the
name of local differences, reducing to a localized empiricism spatial problems
that call for a structural accounting. As I hinted above, in its own elevation of eth-
nicity in matters of cultural formation (as in the preoccupation with Eurocen-
trism and the response to it in ideas such as "multiculturalism"), postcolonial
criticism may even be a significant ideological contributing factor to the contem-
porary saliency of ethnicity as an organizing principle of politics. The postcolo-
nial idea oi "difference" itself is quite vague in its reference. While postcolonial-
ism formally rejects master narratives of culture represented by civilization or
nation, postcolonial criticism in its language continues to speak in terms that
equate nation, ethnicity and culture, rather than in terms of localized cultures
and ethnicities. What sustains the claim to the politics of identity or the politics
of location, ironically, is a methodological individualism that erases the ways in
which the individual may be the embodiment of those master narratives in all
their contradictoriness.H
The desocialized approach to difference in postcolonial criticism which home-
genizes difference has its counterpart in the dehistoricization of difference on a
temporal dimension, and the claiming for postcoloniality of the totality of mod-
ern history, if not all human history. From its origins as a description of post-inde-
pendence colonial societies, postcolonialism has been inflated in meaning to
describe the cultural condition of societies from the moment of their colonization,
which coincides with the whole history of modernity, and also justifies, without
regard to historical trajectory, the inclusion in the "postcolonial" of every society
from Samoa to the United States. Moreover, since the interaction between human
societies, and the phenomenon of colonialism, is not to be restricted to the mod-
ern period (except by reference to economic and political structures), there seems
to be little reason to confine postcolonialism even to the modern period.
This is pretty much the implication of Frederick Buell's triumphalist celebra-
tion of postcolonial criticism in his recent National Culture and the New Global
System.'"' In such projections upon the past, postcolonialism offers itself as a sub-
stitute not only to epistemologies grounded in distinctions between the colonizer
and colonized, or in the Three Worlds idea, but also the revolutionary politics
inspired by those epistemologies. Unlike these predecessors, which were carefully
12 Introduction

delineated in their historical scope, however, postcolonialism offers itself as a

metanarrative that recognizes no historical boundaries. Ironically, even the point
of departure for postcolonial criticism, Eurocentrism, loses its historical meaning
in this perspective, as a postcolonial epistemology grounded in the "negotiation"
or "dialogics" of meaning becomes coextensive with the history of modernity that
is also the history of the European domination of the world that was to produce
Eurocentrism (and capitalism, imperialism, socialism, nationalism, revolutions,
Orientalism, etc.). The destructuring of the past is justified by those such as Buell
by the necessity of restoring the agency and subjectivity in history of those who
disappear beneath an emphasis on structural and structured oppressions, which
is a straw target that one-dimensionally focuses on Eurocentric interpretations of
modernity, and ignores the powerful expressions of agency and subjectivity in the
struggles against it, as in revolutionary struggles, which were equally determi-
nants of the history of modernity. On occasion it also issues in historical inter-
pretations that differ little from earlier liberal interpretations in denying the
importance of capitalism and colonialism in shaping the lives and the outlook of
non-EuroAnaerican peoples,16
Here, too, a methodological individualism is visible in shaping historical inter-
pretation, but there is an additional aspect worth underlining. In two of the essays
below ("There is More in the Rim than Meets the Eye: Thoughts on the 'Pacific
Idea' and "Postcolonial or Postrevolutionary? The Problem of History in Post-
colonial Criticism"), 1 raise the question of "forgetting" in these rereadings of the
past. The Pacific historian Klaus Neumann observes of Papua New Guineans that
these days they "do not appear overtly interested in being told about the horrors
of colonialism, as such accounts potentially belittle today's descendants of yester-
day's victims,"17 Similar shifts in attitude have been observed elsewhere, and may
be related to the changes among minority populations in the U.S. from an
emphasis on oppression to an emphasis on "role models" that appear as symbols
of successful assimilation. While such a shift is perfectly understandable in exis-
tential terms, it needs to be noted nevertheless that it confounds individual suc-
cess with the success of a whole group, ignoring systemic characteristics that
might allow the success of individuals while the group as a whole continues to
suffer from structural obstructions and disabilities. It also implies rewriting the
history of oppression and the resistance to it in accordance with the needs of the
successful among the oppressed, while erasing an earlier radical history that
focused on the group and its liberation as a whole. Such new demands, which
point to new class and gender divisions among oppressed groups, no doubt find
a receptive outlet in postcolonialist epistemology, which in its metanarrativiza-
tion represents the history of modernity as an ongoing process of negotiation and
multiculturalism.
The third way in which I deploy history below is to counteract this new meta-
narrative by drawing attention to the different meanings to be attached to the
relationship between power and cultural formation under different historical cir-
Introduction 13

cumstances. Against a tendency in cultural criticism to conflate power and dis-

course, and to move the former into the reified realm of language and represen-
tation from its material expressions in everyday economic, social and political
relationships, I argue for the necessity of a distinction between the two; not
because I do not think that discourses are imbedded in and expressive of power
relationships, but because the distinction restores the possibility of a dialectical
understanding of the relationship. The essay, "Chinese History and the Question
of Orientalism," argues that Orientalism as a representation of Asian societies was
a product not just of a European imagination of Asia but of the historical inter-
play between European representations and Asian self-representations. If Orien-
talism served the purposes of European power, it was because of the power of
Europeans who could utilize Orientalism to legitimize the literal and ideological
conquest of Asia. Contemporary evidence of representations of Asia also indi-
cates that if Orientalism has undergone a transformation, it is not because of a
postcolonial dissolution of its premises, but because it is now Asians, in complic-
ity with Euro Americans, who promote Orientalist representations of Asia in what
I describe as "self-Orientalization," to assert the new power of Asian societies
within Global Capitalism."
The necessity of such a distinction, if only on political common-sense grounds
against a theoretical preoccupation with "essentialism" and "difference" is pur-
sued further in a number of essays below which seek to distinguish hegemonic
from counter-hegemonic employments of cultural identity," Several essays refer
to hegemonic constructions of regional and cultural formations that, while in
some ways in opposition to Eurocentrism, nevertheless represent ideological for-
mations that legitimize the operations of a globalized capitalism; it is rny con-
tention throughout these essays, in discussions of intellectuals as well as of their
discourses, that the critique of Eurocentrism is no longer (if it ever was) sufficient
as a critique of hegemony. Two other essays ("There Is More in the Rim than
Meets the Eye: Thoughts on the Pacific Idea" and "The Past as Legacy and Project:
History and the Construction of Identity") examine the mobilization of identity
in opposition to such hegemonic constructions. Cultural essentialism, I argue in
these essays, needs to be distinguished in terms of its relationship to structures of
power. "There is More in the Rim Than Meets the Eye" describes the efforts of
Pacific peoples to recover their own notions of spatiality and temporality against
two centuries of EuroAmerican domination of the Pacific. "The Past as Legacy
and Project" argues the same for indigenous peoples, contrasting their efforts at
identity formation not just with hegemonic EuroAmerican erasures of their
claims to their own spatialities and temporalities, but drawing further distinc-
tions between various forms of identity formation in the present, especially cul-
tural nationalism, ethnicity and indigenism.
Finally, I deploy history below to draw a distinction between culturalism with
and without history, in defense of a historicist appreciation of culture and iden-
tity, against the spatial metaphors of hybridity and in-betwcenncss in postcolo-
14 Introduction

nial criticism. The perspective of the past on the present is most important here
because of the distortion that earlier understandings of global relations have suf-
fered as a result of reductionist readings that are informed, I suggest, by transfor-
mations in Third World politics. I have in rnind here the critique in postcolonial
criticism of earlier radical narratives fundamental to which is the allegation that
these earlier narratives presupposed culturally homogeneous entities of one kind
or another, which indicated also that they were unable to overcome the hege-
monic constructions of the world imposed by a Eurocentric discourse. From a
postcolonial perspective, narratives based on coionial/anticolonial oppositions or
the Three Worlds idea are informed by binarisms that presuppose or promote
essentialist notions of culture and identity, while nationalist narratives are
dynamized by ethnic and cultural primordialism.
This may or not be the case, depending on specific historical circumstances.
What is important is that these narratives, no less than postcolonial narratives,
have been products of structural relationships, albeit located at different levels of
political organization. Historically, it was not assumptions of homogenized cul-
tures that produced binarisms or structural divisions of the world into the Three
Worlds, but rather structures of hegemony and struggles against it that called
forth the necessity of cultural homogenization; no less in the invention of Eu rope
than in the case of the colonized or of Third World societies. Nationalism itself
was a product of these same relations, that sought in primordialist homogeniza-
tion of the nation the unity which was essential to ward off threats from the out-
side. This is not to deny that, in the process of delineating the inside from the out-
side, new internal hegemonies were created in the erasure of internal differences.
As recent evidence reveals, homogenization was never total or complete; rather,
the new political formations (conceived at whatever level) provided new sites of
struggle among forces that were themselves products in their identities of the
same political formations.
The search for identity along the divides of colonialism. Three Worlds, and
nationalism has been interpreted in postcolonial criticism as a replication of the
structuring of the world by a hegemonic Eurocentrism, and it no doubt was,
which is especially evident in the idea of Three Worlds, that originated in Euro-
pean social science in the aftermath of World War II in a conceptual reordering
of the world. But to recognize this is only to acknowledge a historical reality.
There is a tendency these days to think that any acknowledgment of a European
capitalist ordering of the world is entrapment in Eurocentrism, with a conse-
quent denial of the subjectivity of the peoples who found their lives reordered by
an outside hegemonic force. I argue, to the contrary, that this is merely a recog-
nition of the historicity of modern identities, in the formation of which the Euro-
pean capitalist ordering of the world played a crucial part. If Eurocentrism is to
be "unthought," the unthinking nevertheless has its points of departure in histor-
ical circumstances that are products of this history,2"
Introduction 15

As far as identity is concerned, it is no less an identity for being historical. To

deny the historicity of identity is indeed to fall into some kind of essentialism, as
in the language of hybridity or in-betweenncss, which implies that there are
essences that surround the borderlands. The assumption in earlier narratives that
the struggle against colonial hegemony had to be conducted on grounds set by
colonialism required neither a culturalist homogeneity nor the denial of agency;
it merely took as its point of departure contemporary circumstances of power,
and sought in the struggle against oppression the creation of new agencies and
cultural identities. Anti-colonial struggles, or struggles conducted in the name of
the Third World or national liberation, produced out of these historical circum-
stances alternative social and political visions that would enable transcending
those circumstances, without falling back upon congealed cultural identities.
Indeed, the necessity of struggle on two fronts (inside and outside) was to pro-
duce a radically historicist notion of culture. (This is the subject below of the two
essays, "Culturalism as Hegemonic Ideology and Liberating Practice," and "The
Past as Legacy and Project: History and the Construction of Identity".) In the
words of Franz Fanon, whom postcolonial critics have sought to appropriate for
their own denial of national cultures, in the process erasing the revolutionary
nationalism that informed his thinking:
A national culture is not a folklore, nor an abstract populism that believes it can dis-
cover a people's true nature. It is not made up of the inert dregs of gratuituous
actions, that is to say actions which are less and less attached to the ever-present real-
ity of the people. A national culture is the whole body of efforts made by a people in
the sphere of thought to describe, justify and praise the action through which the
people has created itself and keeps itself in existence. A national culture in underde-
veloped countries should therefore take its place at the very heart of the struggle for
freedom which these countries are carrying on.21

Whether in its anti-colonialist or Third World expression, or in the language of

national liberation, radical struggles did not presuppose an essentialist primor-
dialism, but rather viewed cultural identity as a project that was very much part
of the struggle for liberation that it informed. That this is ignored in postcolo-
nialist representations of these struggles raises the question of whether the objec-
tion is indeed to the essentialism of past conceptualizations of the world, or to the
aims those struggles promoted, which have become undesirable from a contem-
porary perspective.
If those earlier assertions of cultural identity in liberation struggles seem inap-
propriate today, it is not because their aims were misguided, but because the
alignment of the struggles along earlier divides has become irrelevant due to
structural transformations in global relations. It makes little sense to speak of the
Third World or anti-colonial struggles when the geography of the world economy
has remapped the globe along entirely different boundaries. Even national.
16 Introduction

boundaries are undergoing such a reworking, although it is quite premature

presently to declare the nation a thing of the past. What is important to recall is
riot the nature of the struggles, but the visions of liberation that they produced,
which sought in contemporary circumstances the production of alternative ways
of living that would overcome both internal and external oppressions that had
already become indistinguishable. Such radical visions are still urgently needed
at a time when the reification of difference preempts the possibility of identities
that may serve as the sources of new visions and struggles, while it also breeds
new essentialisms that contribute to the proliferation of reactionary movements
around the world. In a sense, the predicament of the contemporary world may
be the predicament, in the words of Andrei Codrescu, of "the disappearance of
the outside," which, having brought down the Berlin Wall, condemns us to wal-
low in the pleasures of "the Berlin mall,"22 Rather than erasing the memory of
radical struggles of the past by converting the past itself into one big mall of
identity transactions, it is necessary to recall it as an inventory of alternative
modes of living out of which to construct new visions appropriate to the times,

Theory, History and Common Sense: Local Movements

and Indigenism as Locations for a New Radicalism
A fundamental question raised by postcolonialism (and postmodernism in gen-
eral) concerns the relationship between knowledge and everyday life: what kind
of knowledge is appropriate to the purposes of the good life, by which I mean the
rather modest goal of a life that is minimally subject to the ravages of exploita-
tion and oppression." Theory may unravel for us the nature of exploitation and
oppression, but it does not in and of itself supply answers to that question;
indeed, an overemphasis on theory which substitutes theory for life may deepen
the problem it is intended to resolve. History may provide us with an inventory
of possibilities, but it does not offer answers to the problem of choice except in its
ideological versions (it matters little whether the teleology is that of capitalism,
or of socialism as we have known it), the consequences of which already offer
familiar lessons. The theorization of history, as the historicization of theory, may
help us locate ourselves in space and time and provide some sense of what choices
may be appropriate, but that is about all. In the end the choice is guided by a com-
mon sense appreciation of what is possible, and desirable. Common sense, of
course, is not transparent, but must be theorized in its historicity; it is necessary,
in turn, to tame the excesses of theory, or the despotism of the past.21 Thus, com-
mon sense requires that, however complex identity may be in its heterogeneity or
historicity, people, including postcolonial critics, act on an everyday basis with
some fairly firm notions of identity; just as we do not, everytime we bite into a
nectarine (invented by a Korean-American), worry about whether we are biting
into an apple or a peach.3 Common sense requires that we distinguish one type
of identity formation from another in terms of their relationship to power. And
Introduction 17

common sense requires a recognition that everytime we interact with someone,

the interaction carries on it the traces of the structures that encompass it, and the
legacy of the history of all such interactions.
In the essay, "The Postmodernization of Production and Its Organization," I
draw a distinction between postmodernism with or without capitalism, by which
I mean that whether or not postmodernism fulfills its critical aspirations depends
on its willingness to account for the structures of power of which it is both prod-
uct and constituent, without which it merely degenerates into a celebration of the
present, even to the extent of covering up contemporary modes of oppression
and exploitation.26 If I may paraphrase Georg Lukacs* description of Marxism as
the "self-criticism" of the bourgeoisie, postmodernism is most plausible as an
extension, and self-criticism, of modernity. Similarly, postcolonialism requires for
the fulfillment of its critical aspirations an accounting of the global as a condition
of the local, as well as an articulation of its own epistemology to the radical epis-
temologies of the past; without which it becomes a celebration of new global and
social relations created by a globalized capitalism.
Let me illustrate this point with reference to "multiculturalism," which has
been attached quite closely to a postcolonialist interpretation of relations between
cultures. In the same essay on "The Postmodernization of Production," 1 trace at
least one important source of multiculturalism to the concern of transnational
corporations on how to deal with a "multicultural" work force, that preceded by
the long academic concern with the question. And business has continued to be
in the forefront of the current craze with globalism and multiculturalism. That
does not make multiculturalism undesirable, but indicates the ways in which it is
connected with the consolidation of current structures of power by admitting
into it those who were formerly excluded but are now nearly impossible to keep
out—both out of consideration of the needs of power, and because of social
demands on it. In the end, however, multiculturalism does not point to a way out
of existing structures of power, only to modifications within it.
Contrast that with what I will describe, inelegantly, as "multi-historicalism,"
which, unlike a multiculturalism that presupposes reified culturalisms, presup-
poses the historicity of cultures, and different historical trajectories out of differ-
ent pasts, that provide "outsides" from which to view contemporary structures of
power and the ideologies of history that legitimize them. Whatever we may think
of something like "Afrocentrism," it is unwise nevertheless to ignore the questions
it raises, fundamental to which is the recovery of histories that have been sup-
pressed in the formation of a capitalist and Eurocentric modernity.'" Multi-his-
toricalism, in its very repudiation of a single historical trajectory in the past, also
opens the way to thinking of the future in terms of alternative historical trajecto-
ries that defy the colonization of the future by current structures oi power. To ful-
fill this radical possibility, however, multi-historicalism has to recognize the his-
toricity of the cultural and social alternatives that it proposes rather than reify
them; in other words, that a future historical trajectory to be constructed out of
18 Introduction

past legacy must be contingent in its liberatory possibilities on the reworking of

past legacy by a contemporary consciousness, if only because no legacy of the past
is free from its own particular modes of oppression and exploitation. It does not
do simply to set other histories against a Eurocentric history, as if the latter were
the only one marked by oppression and exploitation.
I propose below, in ways that may have some kinship with postmodernity and
postcolonialism, that a contemporary radicalism must take local struggles as its
point of departure, and that indigenism as one type of identity formation may
provide an appropriate model for such struggles. Local struggles are already part
of the global political landscape, and not for lortuituous reasons. As 1 argue in
several of the essays below (especially in "The Global in the Local"), the very
operations of capital that have dislocated earlier divisions of the world, including
national boundaries, have created new contradictions that have brought prob-
lems of the local and the global to the forefront of political consciousness. Like-
wise, a contemporary radicalism must take as its point of departure these very
same contradictions. But there is more to what I advocate than mere recognition
of political realities." The local is the site where action toward new community
formations is the most plausible. This is also where indigenous ideals of social
relationships and relationships to nature may have the most to offer; especially in
their challenge to the voracious developmentalism of capitalism, which has also
been assimilated to Marxism in its historical unfolding. As I explain below, what
I have in mind is not indigenous ideals as they are reified in New Age consump-
tions of indigenism, but indigenous ideals as they have been reworked by a con-
temporary consciousness, where indigenism appears not merely as a reproduc-
tion of the past, but as a project to be realized/9
The difference of this idea of the local from that in postcolonial criticism
should be evident in its insistence that, under the circumstances of a global cap-
italism, the local is impossible to conceive without reference to the global. It is
also lodged in a different kind of knowledge; not that of the exile or the travelling
theorist, but in local knowledge informed by and directed at local community
formation. That does not make exilic knowledge irrelevant, since that knowledge
itself speaks directly to contemporary historical circumstances, but regrounds it
in the intermediation of social lives conceived locally3"—an essential necessity, it
local struggles are to have any chance of success against the seemingly insupera-
ble forces of transnational structures of power.

Notes
1. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 1991), p.x,
2. John O'Neill, The Poverty of Postmodernism (London and New York: Routledge,
1995}, p. 18.
Introduction 19

3. Since most of this argument is derivative of what is presented in greater detail in the
essays that follow, I will not bother with documentation here except where I invoke sources
that have come to my attention since the essays were written,
4. For "the rule of Literature" in contemporary postmodernism, see David Simpson's
extensive argument in The Academic Postmodern and the Rule of Literature: A Report on
Half-Knowledge (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995).
5. Frederick Buell, National Culture and the New Global System (Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1994), p.235.
6. There is, of course, no reason why the same epistemology should not he applied to
relations between genders, or even between classes, say, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat,
The latter, of course, would return us to Hegel's metaphor of master-slave relationships,
not to speak of Prospero and Caliban, and back to the future by way of Eugene Genovese.
In Chapter 9,1 discuss the application of postmodernism to organizations, which provides
an illustration of the use of this epistemology in class relations. It also illustrates how the
same epistemology, without reference to structures of power relations, covers up hierar-
chies of power, and class oppression and exploitation.
7. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), p.5.
8. Aijaz Ahmad, "The Politics of Literary Postcoloeiality," Race and Class 36,3
(1995): 1-20.
9. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), p.332.
10. Georg Simmel, "The Stranger," in The Sociology ofGeorg Simmel, tr. and ed. with an
introduction by Kurt H. Wolff (New York: The Free Press, 1950), pp.402-408.
11. An example of this line of reasoning is to be found in Lisa Lowe, "Heterogeneity,
Hybridity, Multiplicity: Marking Asian American Differences," Diaspora, 1.1 (Spring
1991 ):24-44, which has been rather influential in some circles. I would like to add an elab-
oration here to my idea of totality. Totality does not imply a static homegeneity, as it is
interpreted in some circles, but is subject itself to ongoing transformation due to the inter-
action of the forces it contains, which in turn structure the totality. The central relation-
ship of capitalism, class relationship, must itself be understood in this dynamic sense. One
of the products of Global Capitalism is emergent transnational classes which, for all their
contradictions, must provide the frame of reference tor analysis appropriate to the present.
This is, of course, one of the factors that have rendered the division of First and Third
Worlds irrelevant, because there is now a recognizable Third World capitalist class that
participates in global rule. This is another phenomenon thai is covered up by an excessive
emphasis on Eurocentrism.
12. "In order to function-—or even to survive—the politics of difference must exclude
those who are really different, such as Iranian fundamentalists or staunch defenders of
apartheid, that is, those who don't include themselves in their idea of difference, for whom
it is only the others who are always different." Bertens, The Idea of the Postmodern: A His-
tory (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), pp.192-193.
13. AJkbar S, Ahmed, Postmodernism and Islam: Predicament and Promise (London:
Routledge, 1992), p. 13.
14. Levine, Sober and Wright have explained "methodological individualism" as "the
view that all social phenomena are best explained by the properties of the individuals who
comprise the phenomena; or, equivalently, that any explanation involving macro-level,
20 Introduction

social concepts should in principle be reduced to micro-level explanations involving only

individuals and their properties," New Left Review 162 (March-April l987);67-84. They
further clarify their explanation by contrasting methodological individualism with atom-
ism, radical holism and anti-reductionism. Unlike atomism, methodological individual-
ism recognizes the importance of relationships, but at the individual level.
15. Frederick Buell, National Culture and the New Global System (Baltimore and Lon-
don: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).
16. For an important discussion of this problem, see Vtnay Bafal, "Class Consciousness
and Primordial Values in the Shaping of the Indian Working Class," South Asia Bulletin,
vol. 13, no. 1 and 2 (1993):152-172. Bahl is especially critical of the work of Chakrabarty
on the Indian working class for downplaying the importance of colonialism in shaping
class politics, and ending up blaming the victims for their fate. For Chakrabarty's own
reconsideration of his earlier position, and reaffirmation of the indispensability of capi-
talism as a framework of analysis, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, "Marx After Marxism: History,
Subalternity and Difference," in Saree Makdisi, Cesare Cesarino and Rebecca E. Karl (eds.),
Marxism Beyond Marxism (New York; Routledge, 1996), pp.55—70, especially p.62.
17. Klaus Neumann,'"In Order to Win Their Friendship*: Renegotiating First Contact,"
The Contemporary Pacific, vol., 6 no. 1 (Spring 1994);] IJ—145.
i 8, Already in 1980, in a review of Edward Said's Orientalism, Sadik Jala! al-'Azm noted
this self'Orientalization which he described as "Orientalism in reverse." See al-'Azm, "Ori-
entalism and Orientalism in Reverse," Khamsin (1980):5-26.
19. A note is in order here on the question of hegemony, which too has been the sub-
ject of considerable manipulation in postcolonial criticism. In Antonio Gramsci's origi-
nal formulation, hegemony was intended to supplement materialist with cultural analy-
sis, not to substitute culture for material analysis (or even to suggest that they could be
separated), which is the way in which the use of hegemony appears in much contempo-
rary analysis. This has its counterpart in social relations in the use of the idea of subal-
ternity. Gramsci, as a Marxist, was searching for ways out of subalternity, to enable the
working class to achieve power. This, of course, appears presently as a celebration of sub-
alternity, which may be fairly revealing of the obliviousness to (or maybe even mystifica-
tion of) questions of power. For a discussion that sharply calls attention to these prob-
lems, see Teresa L. Ebert, "Ludic Feminism, the Body, Performance, and Labor: Bringing
Materialism Back into Feminist Cultural Studies," Cultural Critique (Winter
1992~1993}:5-50.
20.1 owe "Unthinking Eurocentrism" to Ella Shohat and Robert Starn, Unthinking Euro-
centrism; Multicuhuralism and the Media (London and New York; Routledge, 1994).
21. Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1968), p. 188. In his
"Critical Fanonism," Critical Inquiry 17 (Spring 199I):457—470, Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,
offers an interesting discussion of the different ways in which Fanon is interpreted these
days. What is equally interesting is that Gates has little to say on the differences between
past and present interpretations of Fanon, or the political implications of the conflicting
interpretations of the present.
22. Andrei Codrescu, The Disappearance of the Outside; A Manifesto for Escape (Red-
ding, MA: Addison-Wesiey, 1990),
23. The question of course is not new, even if it needs to be rephrased in a radically dif-
ferent technological grammar, which is all the more reason for recalling past anwers to it.
The classic formulation for an earlier period was that of Paulo Freire, The Pedagogy of the
Introduction 21

Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 1993), Also pertinent are the many works of Ivan Illich,
especially Tools for Conviviality (New York: Harper and Row, 1973) and DeschooKng Soci-
ety (New York: Harper and Row, 1971).
24. See John O'Neill, The Poverty of Postmodernism, Chapter 8, for a case for the neces-
sity of articulating sociological theory to common sense experience, to create a theory that
incorporates the voices of those that the theory speaks about,
25. Ulf Hannerz puts it nicely: "At times . . . the depictions of the postmodern age
deserve some of its own incredulity. When it is claimed, for example, that identities
become nothing but assemblages from whatever imagery is for the moment marketed
through the media, then 1 wonder what kind of people the commentators on postmod-
ernism know; I myself know hardly anybody of whom this would seem true," Hannerz,
Cultural Complexity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p.35.
26. This distinction corresponds in a different phraseology to Teresa Eberfs distinction
between "ludic" and "resistance" postmodernism. Ebert, p. 11.
27. There is reason to be critical of Afrocentrism, or any other "centrisrn," to the extent
that it reifies the past. But this is not the usual reason for criticism. Even the most ardent
critics of Afrocentrism, or indigenism, for that matter, might want to consider that while
something like the sinocentric Confucian revival is taken seriously even when it is rejected,
the general tendency is to dismiss ideologies of Afrocentrism or indigenism as myths that
do not merit serious consideration. The Confucian revival is in keeping with conventions
of Orientalism. It is also in keeping, more importantly, with the expectations of a capital-
ist teleology, since that revival has taken the form not of challenges to capitalism in the
name of Confucian values, but an articulation of Confucian values (in highly reductionist
interpretations) to capitalist development. Afrocentrism and indigenism, on the other
hand, reassert values that are quite at odds with capitalist developmentalism. The response
to them, even among so-called radicals, however, is also indicative of the persistence of
residual ideologies of civilization: since Africans or Indians were not civilized, and con-
tinue to be haunted with political and economic weakness, any claims to history on their
part must be mythical, while European, Chinese, East Indian, or Islamic (where relevant,
as in Malaysia, for instance) claims, that are equally questionable, must be taken seri-
ously—especially as they register impressive rates of economic development. This corre-
sponds, in some ways, to a political skepticism that views any advocacy of the local as a
throwback to romantic notions that go against history, rather than as an expression of con -
temporary structures of power, and the struggles against it. An example may be found in
the work of David Simpson (cited above), which is quite perspicacious in its critique of
academic postmodernism, but fails to distinguish the ways in which advocacies of the
local, or the telling of stories, may carry different meanings in different historical contexts.
One of the most fundamental problems of postcolonial "criticism" is to evaluate such dif-
ferences critically, especially as it is appropriated in the First World acadernia.
28. How real these issues are may be gleaned from the initial response to Patrick
Buchanan's right-wing populism in the current presidential campaign. Disingenuous
Buchanan may be, but his message concerning the relationship between economic
transnationalism and the plight of the working people struck a responsive chord among
many. Equally revealing was the anxious response of the political and economic elite
(regardless of party affiliation), with their references to Buchanan's armies of "pitchforked
peasants." One commentator went so far as to describe Buchanan as a "Icftwinger." See
Clifford D. May, "Buchanan's Rise Undermines the Republican Revolution," Rocky Mown-
22 Introduction

tain News, February 25, 1996, p,62A, For an alternative view, which recognizes the seri-
ousness of the issues involved, see Thomas Friedman, "Balancing NAFTA and Neighbor-
hood," Rocky Mountain News, April 13, 1996, p.44A.
29,1 realize that this historicization of indigenism does violence to indigenous concep-
tions of time and space, which repudiate EuroAnterican notions of history. Thus, Vine
OeLoria, Jr., writes of religion that the "dilemma over the nature of history occurs and will
occur whenever a religion is divorced from space and made an exclusive agent of time." By
contrast, "Indian tribes combine history and geography so that they have a 'sacred geogra-
phy," that is to say, every location within their homeland has a multitude of stories that
recount the migrations) revelations, and particular historical incidents that cumulatively
produced the tribe in its current condition." Vine DeLoria, Jr., God b Red; A Native View
of Religion (Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 1994), pp.121-122. Indigenism itself, how-
ever, has been reworked by the historical developments discussed here, so that there are
also postmodern and postcolonial Indians. For examples, see Gerald Vizenor (ed.), Narra-
tive Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Literature (Norman and London:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1993) and Gerald R, McMaster, "Border Zones: The'Injun-
uity' of Aesthetic Tricks," Cultural Studies 9:1(1995):74-90. Nevertheless, in thinking of
multi-histortcaiism as 1 suggest it here, one should include in it indigenous beliefs that
repudiate history as epistemoiogy.
30. This in some sense is implicit in those versions of diaspora that take diasporic pop-
ulations not as off-ground Boating ethnicities that can be homogenized culturally, but as
networks of locally grounded peoples with a great deal of internal differentiation. I think
it is this approach to the question of diaspora, as well as his meticulous attention both to
historical specificity and structural context, that distinguishes the work of Paul Gilroy as
fruitful example of postcoloeial criticism. See The Black Atlantic, op. cit.